


dilaudid

by piggy09



Series: Project Leto [6]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Character Swap, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 17:53:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5258033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’ll be alright, Helena tells herself. Sarah will come back. Sarah doesn’t have anywhere else to go; they don’t have anyone except each other, there’s nowhere else for Sarah to turn. She’ll come back, and Helena will find a way to explain the truth that Sarah will believe, and they’ll be fine. </p>
<p>(More Project Leto! Helena and Sarah are still proclones. Things are still not what you would call "fine.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	dilaudid

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: character death, violence, short reference to self-harm, drug overdose, possible suicide reference?]
> 
> You should read all the other fics in the series before reading this one, because otherwise it will not make one _lick_ of sense.

1.

“We’re leaving,” Sarah says, storming into their office like a dark cloud; her coat’s on, hair pulled over one shoulder, and she’s trembling very delicately. Helena looks at the clock on her laptop – it’s hours early yet, they’ve a Skype call at midnight and it’s ridiculous to leave now. She closes her laptop with the tips of her fingers, looks at Sarah. Sarah’s skin is waxy. She looks like she’s going to be sick.

“Won’t that throw up a red flag for Aldous,” Helena says slowly.

“Aldous can rot,” Sarah spits back, looking angry and sharp as a barracuda. The problem is this: Helena can’t tell who Sarah’s angry _at_.

But if Sarah says everything is alright, everything is alright. So Helena packs her bag, slowly, follows her sister out the door. Her hand’s itching to grab Sarah’s but Sarah is walking fast, the sound of her heels on the ground like accusing gunshots. She practically throws herself into the backseat of their car, presses herself up against the window like – like she’s desperate to avoid Helena’s company, like she’ll be sick if she lays hands on her sister’s skin. Helena leans out the opposite window, wracks her brain frantically to attempt to figure out what’s thrown Sarah off-balance.

Is this about Beth?

No, no, it can’t be about Beth. Sarah forgave Helena, and Helena forgave Sarah, and they’re perfectly alright now. Helena’s been keeping an eye on Sarah just in case but Sarah has been – almost her normal self, like nothing has changed. If she’s a little scattered, well, Helena can cover for her alright. That’s what they _do_. They look after each other. They keep each other safe.

So no, it can’t be about Beth. Helena looks out the window, watches the world pass by outside, tries to figure it out. Sarah says nothing, does nothing, just sits there and shakes. Every now and then some sort of violent shudder overtakes her and she clenches her hands together tight in her lap; Helena twists her own in mute sympathetic horror, doesn’t reach out. Stays silent. They troop inside in silence, pass through their apartment, enter the one room in the house that doesn’t have cameras. Helena drops her bag by the bed with a sigh, watches as Sarah does the same. Sarah shucks her shoes with a sort of angry impatience – oh, they’re Helena’s shoes, ever-so-slightly too small. Poor Sarah.

“Well?” Sarah says, the syllable broken; she’s started pacing back and forth, back and forth, every now and then running a hand through her hair. Left hand, Helena notes absently. Poor, poor Sarah.

“Sarah,” she says patiently, “I don’t know why we’re here.”

Sarah skids to a halt, stares goggle-eyed at Helena. “You don’t—” she says numbly, and then starts pacing again. “You don’t—” She starts to shudder, viciously. “You’re going to stand there, and you’re going to say that you _don’t know why_ – why – _Helena!_ ”

Helena has to swallow sharply at the sound of her name in Sarah’s mouth, how much it sounds like it hurts. “Explain,” she says desperately, “and I’ll try and fix it – Sarah, I can’t fix it if I don’t know what’s happened.”

Sarah’s breaths are ragged as she paces back across the room, tears through her briefcase and pulls out a packet of papers that she shoves at Helena. She catches herself just before she would’ve shoved her, and the papers hover bare centimeters from Helena’s skin. Helena grabs them, delicately, pages through them as the drumbeats of Sarah’s footsteps start up again.

Oh. It’s Beth’s toxicology report. Helena pages through it, slowly, drugs in the stomach, surplus of alcohol, overdose, nothing she hasn’t—

Wait, she thinks to herself. It _is_ something she hasn’t seen before. Helena knows what drugs caused Beth to overdose, and none of them are on the list. She flips through it, back to the front page. Subject number...

Oh no.

“Alison’s dead?” she whispers slowly.

“Shut _up!_ ” Sarah hisses, “Stop acting like—”

_Oh_ no.

“Sarah,” Helena says with a sudden desperation, “Sarah, _I didn’t kill her_.”

Sarah stops abruptly, stares at Helena. Her face is completely blank. “Are you telling me,” she says dully, “that this is a _coincidence_. That Alison Hendrix just _happened_ to overdose immediately after another subject.”

“ _Yes_.”

Sarah makes a strange choking noise, starts swaying in place. She’s rocking from the balls of her feet back down to her heels, back up again, like she can’t decide how to stand. “I don’t understand why,” she whispers. “Alison hasn’t _done_ anything, I haven’t gone near any of the others, I haven’t ruined any of them the way that I—” she stops, smears her hands down her face. “That you—” Stops again. “That _we_ —”

“Sarah,” Helena says, taking a cautious step forward, “Sarah, listen to me. I didn’t kill Alison. I have no motive to kill Alison. This _isn’t our fault_.”

Sarah stands there. Helena risks another step forward, watches the tremors build back up under Sarah’s skin. Another step. Oh, she’s shaking now, full-on.

“I could almost forgive you for it,” Sarah whispers brokenly. “I could – I could _forgive_ you. But Helena,” her voice breaks, wobbles, “ _lying?_ ”

“ _I’m not lying_ ,” Helena roars, and—

_Crack_.

There’s a moment where they both stand there, Sarah staring at Helena with complete and all-consuming horror. Her hand’s still raised. Helena raises her own hand, brings it to her face and hisses at the sting.

Oh, she thinks dully. Sarah slapped her.

Sarah stands at her own hand, watches it as it begins to shake. She takes a step back, then another, then another, and then with a sudden violence she makes her way to the door of their bedroom and runs.

Helena stands there, listens as the door of their apartment slams shut. Her hand’s still touched to her face, delicately. Sarah slapped her. Sarah didn’t believe her, and Sarah hit her, and Sarah is gone.

Helena sits down on the bench at the foot of their bed, slowly. It’ll be alright, she tells herself. Sarah will come back. Sarah doesn’t have anywhere else to go; they don’t have anyone except each other, there’s nowhere else for Sarah to turn. She’ll come back, and Helena will find a way to explain the truth that Sarah will believe, and they’ll be fine.

She hugs her legs to her chest and bites the inside of her lip fiercely so that she doesn’t cry. She doesn’t need to cry. There’s nothing wrong that they can’t fix. Sarah will come back.

ii.

Sarah doesn’t come back.

_+6 hours (5:00am)_

Helena doesn’t sleep, stands up and stretches out her cold and tired bones when the sun starts rising. If Sarah’s not here Sarah’s already at the DYAD, and Helena will just go there and everything will – she can’t even think it, the words sound too hollow. She gets ready in silence. The ride over: silence. The DYAD Institute is grave-quiet this hour of the morning, everyone either already here or still dreaming. Helena’s heels are so loud on the tile.

(Sarah didn’t even take shoes with her, when she left. She’s barefoot. She’s barefoot, and she’s alone, and—)

(—and she thinks Helena _lied_ to her, and—)

Their office is empty, when she gets there. Helena sinks down into her chair and rests her head in her hands. Sarah’s not here. Sarah’s not here, and Sarah’s not at their apartment, and there is nowhere else for her to go. She sits there while her sleepless headache bangs against her temples; she doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting in some sort of dull dystopian daze before there’s a polite cleared throat from outside. Helena peels one eye open.

Good lord, it’s Aldous. What awful timing. He has a knack for it.

“Hello, Helena,” he says, eyeing her with a sort of horribly dull suspicion. “You’re here early. Where’s Sarah?”

“Sick,” Helena says. Her voice sounds like it’s been dragged up from the bottom of a well, but she can’t find it in herself to care.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Aldous says. He takes the seat across the desk without being invited to. Helena stares at him, lets all emotion vanish from her eyes until they’re two dark stones.

“Are you alright?” he asks, head tilted to one side in something between scientific curiosity and paternal sympathy. “Looks like Alison’s death hit Sarah pretty hard. It’s a hard thing, to lose a sister.”

Helena breathes in very deliberately through her nose so that she doesn’t leap over the desk like an animal, knock Aldous to the floor, bang his head against the tile over and over until it’s cracked open and bleeding and then shove her thumbs in his eye sockets until his eyes burst open and—

“We are both,” she says slowly, “perfectly alright.” She smiles, doesn’t even pretend that it’s sincere. It feels like a dead thing on her face.

“If you say so,” Aldous says. They eye each other, two cold reptilian predators. But then he claps his hands together, and he’s settled back into that warm father-skin again. “Well! Let me know when Sarah comes in, we’re going to have to work overtime on this – I’ll need the both of you onboard.”

“Of course,” Helena says, voice colored with exhaustion. She watches as Aldous leaves, resists the urge to just rest her head on her folded arms and fall asleep. This isn’t the first time she’s covered for Sarah like this, she realizes. The first time was the day after Helena came back to their apartment to find Sarah standing there wearing Beth’s skin. Everything since then has just been Helena pretending that Sarah wasn’t losing her mind. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She’s gnawing on her lip, doesn’t know how long she has been, can’t find it in her to stop. How _long_ —

She can’t stop herself from opening her laptop, typing a rapid string of keys that gets her to the security footage for Beth’s apartment. Finds the date – _the_ date – and starts fast-forwarding, frantically, through hours and hours of footage, empty empty empty empty—

Beth. Only Beth was in America at the time of this recording, so: Sarah. She looks so very delighted to be there. Helena tastes blood on her teeth from her lip. Or maybe it’s lipstick. Who knows, who cares. Onscreen Sarah and Paul are talking; Sarah takes steps forward and kisses him, presses herself up against him like—

She stops the tape. Sarah knew exactly what she was doing. The mannerisms, the way of walking, all flawless. She _knew Beth_. It was like – like an _homage_.

Something is churning in Helena’s stomach. In another window, she opens Sarah’s reports on Beth’s medical exams. Picks one at random, goes to the corresponding date on the camera logs. Forward, forward, forward, Beth glitching around her apartment like a wayward ghost caught on camera.

There. Helena presses play, watches the crew of doctors leave. Watches Sarah standing there, just another sort of ghost. Watches as Sarah peels the covers off and gets into bed with Beth.

Helena’s thumb is in her mouth and she’s gnawing the polish off the edge of her nail with a single-minded animal ferocity. She picks another date. An eighteen-year-old Sarah twines Beth’s hair around her fingers. Another date. Sarah, Beth. Another date. Sarah Beth. Back and back and – that, there, that’s when Helena left for Germany. Sarah crouches down next to the bed, reaches out lovingly and presses her finger to Beth’s skin in the dark.

Helena stops the tape. It’s frozen on her laptop screen, that one moment of contact. The Creation of Adam.

The sick thing in her stomach is growing claws and teeth, pulling its way up to her ribcage. Helena changes windows, 359M20 to 414B19. Alison Hendrix’s bedroom, and: Sarah. Helena spits out flecks of gold nail polish onto the desk, switches to her index finger. 337C11. Sarah sitting on Tony’s bed, holding a long rambling conversation with his sleeping body. 392N65. Sarah watching Nadia sleeping in the dark, her coltish teenage limbs folded into the bed.

324B21. The entire desk is covered with confetti-flecks of Helena’s nail polish. Her teeth are stained gold. Sarah – so young, so very young – climbs into Cosima’s bed. They aren’t facing each other; they aren’t womb-matched. Helena holds her breath. Slowly, Sarah reaches across the space between them, reaches for Cosima’s hand.

Helena stops the tape, quick, like a snake striking. Her fingers hover there over the space bar of her computer. Underneath the scratched gold, her nails are pink and soft and she can _feel_ it, the urge to reach through the screen and make Sarah something she can touch. She just – she just wants to _touch_ her, know that she’s real. But she can’t. So instead she slips her fingers back into her mouth, keeps chewing. Like she could eat her own urges, if only she tried hard enough.

She stares at the grainy black-and-white image. Maybe if she doesn’t play it they’ll stay frozen like this, Cosima and Sarah, and it will be fine and nothing will have changed and it won’t be real. But Helena’s not stupid. That isn’t how that works. Slowly, slowly, she reaches out and presses play again.

Onscreen, Sarah laces her fingers with Cosima’s. Offscreen Helena rests her face in her hands, and wishes she were blind.

~~6.~~ ~~12.~~ 4\.  ~~13.~~ ~~10.~~ ~~25.~~

Time passes. Sarah doesn’t arrive. Helena shoves the heels of her hands into her cheekbones, presses them all the way up, cleans off all the remnants of her nail polish from the desk, and makes phone calls.

Men at every bus stop, shipyard, train station. She puts someone near Cosima Niehaus’ hotel, Alison Hendrix’s house, Elizabeth Childs’ apartment. All over. If Sarah wants to run – fine. Helena will hunt her down, if she has to.

She feels the urge to get out of her chair and pace, let out some of the movement that’s coiling through her limbs, but: then she realizes that’s what Sarah was doing, before she left, and she remembers Sarah running her left hand through her hair over and over and she refocuses her attention on her laptop instead. Helena knows her sister. Helena _knows her sister_ , she does, even if it’s seeming more and more that this thought should be in past-tense. Think.

Helena recrosses her legs, folds her left fingers into a fist on the table so she can’t see her nails. Her right hand is untouched, the nails immaculate. Think. You can’t go home, and you’ve spent – years – you’ve spent years slipping into the other’s lives when home isn’t an option. So where would you go?

Getting the security feed from the lobby in Cosima’s hotel is less easy than getting the feed from the camera in her apartment, but it’s still possible. The DYAD is an animal that sprawls lazily across the whole world. They all just live in its stomach.

People pass through the lobby, but none of them are the person Helena cares about. She puts the footage on rewind. Doesn’t gnaw on her right hand. Doesn’t fidget. Doesn’t slam her fist against the wall, over and over again, until her hand is shattered and she doesn’t have to focus on anything but the pain-signals blaring from her broken bones and the way the blood drips red—

She smashes her hand on the space bar. There. Sarah.

Helena swallows down the surge of pain in her chest when she checks the timestamp – 7:00 in the morning. She _just missed her_. There will be a man in a suit arriving to stand inconspicuously in the lobby in maybe five minutes, and Sarah is _gone_. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

Helena places her hands flat on the desk and stares at the frozen frame on her computer screen. The quality is ludicrously poor and so she can’t zoom in, can’t read her sister’s emotional state from the wrinkles in her brow or the twitches of her fingers. All she can see is Sarah leaving, the dark grey pixel-smudges of blood she’s trailing behind her. Helena sighs, through her teeth. Makes another phone call, to clean up Sarah’s mess. Hangs up. Redials.

“Helena,” says Aldous.

“Aldous,” Helena says, pinching the bridge of her nose hard in an attempt at some relief. “Subject 324B21 may need to be made self-aware earlier than you’d planned.”

Aldous doesn’t comment on how Helena knew this – it’s Sarah’s branch, not hers, if there’s a difference – but just sits in silence for a moment. “What’s the reason for this, exactly?” he asks.

“She’s made contact with Sarah,” Helena says, “and we aren’t in a position to sit down with her right now, deal with this through the agreed-upon channels.”

“I thought Sarah was sick,” Aldous says.

“She is.”

There’s a moment of silence and Helena feels near physically nauseous with this: showing Aldous her hand, revealing that there is something wrong. She’d promised to protect her sister, and here she is: telling the _truth_ , of all things. She can hear Aldous’ breathing on the other side of the phone, can almost hear the machine of his brain putting things together. Sarah isn’t sick in the way they’d all want Sarah to be sick. Not like that.

“Helena,” Aldous says, in some sick parody of gentleness, and Helena cuts him off. “Tell 324B21 yourself, if you’d like, or send someone else to do it. I don’t care. Make sure it’s _done_.” She hangs up the phone, doesn’t slam it on the desk. Breathes. In, out. Sarah’s already left Cosima’s building – god, she could be anywhere. Sauntering into the middle of the police station with Beth’s swagger in her joints, that way she’d learned to walk when the two of them came up with safe measures. Here is who you will learn to be. Here is what you will tell me to say that you are yourself and everything is alright. Red, rot, rouge.

All she can do is wait, because she isn’t the sort of animal that could hunt Sarah down through the winding street-veins of the city. They’d both be lost. What would be the help, of both of them being lost?

Instead Helena keeps typing away at her keyboard, cursing every law put in place to prevent bugging hotel rooms. No cameras, no audio, nothing nothing _nothing_. What did Sarah _do_ , what did Sarah break that Helena is going to have to fix?

Her mind chews over the possibilities, spitting out picked bones – blood, fire, an endless series of wreckage. She’s almost considered chewing all the nail polish off her other hand, just to distract herself, by the time she gets a call. Sarah’s at a train station. It’s almost a relief, in a sickening way – that Helena can still understand where Sarah would go.

She grabs her briefcase, coat, walks out of her office as quickly as she can manage. Waits until the voice on the other end stops babbling and then says, coldly, “Stop the trains.”

“What?”

“If you intend to make me repeat myself,” Helena says quietly as she clatters down the staircase of the building, “it won’t be you I’ll be repeating it to.”

There’s a nervous pause on the other end; she puts the phone on speaker, calls for a car. The voice comes back, nervous: trains on hold, ma’am, and Helena dreams of clawing her way through the phone and ripping out the tongue on the other side. Instead she gets in the car that pulls up, holds her muscles very very still. Hangs up the phone, tries her hardest not to flip it back and forth between her fingers.

“Wait,” she tells the driver, when they arrive. Sit, stay, good dog. She walks into the station like she’s never been afraid of anything in her entire life, because there are instincts that end up woven into your bones.

An instinct: the shudder of relief that travels through her entire body when she sees Sarah standing in the middle of the platform. Her arms are folded to herself, and the platform around her is smudged with rust-blood. Helena walks across the platform slowly, and Sarah looks up and stares at her. Her eyes are glazed. Her gaze travels from the top of Helena’s head down across her skirt suit to her heels. Back up again. Her eyes linger on Helena’s pinned-up hair.

“You look like a dream I had once,” Sarah says, when Helena gets close enough to hear her. “Or a memory I can’t quite recall.”

“It’s just me,” Helena says softly. “It’s alright, Sarah. We can go home.”

Sarah turns her head, looks at the track. It’s empty. There’s no train coming; there will never be a train coming, as long as the two of them are standing here. Helena reaches out, gentle and slow, and touches Sarah’s upper arm. Wraps her hand around it, like an anchor. Or a handcuff. Sarah’s eyes close, tight.

“Would you like to know how hard I tried to stay angry with you,” she whispers.

“No,” Helena says.

“I kept remembering – stupid things,” Sarah says. “Our ninth birthday party. That papercut you got a few months ago. I stood at a crosswalk and the light was red and I—” The muscles on her arms ripple as her hand clenches into a fist.

Helena doesn’t say anything; she steps out of her shoes, flexes her toes against the cold concrete of the platform.

“You’re bleeding,” she says. “Put these on, let’s go.”

Sarah blinks rapidly, looks down at the shoes, at her own feet, back at the shoes. “I can’t feel it,” she says curiously, like she’s picking apart Helena’s words and looking for the lie in them.

“You are,” Helena says. “Trust me.” Around them the entire platform is smeared with red; Sarah’s gaze flits over it, unfocused, and then she puts one foot and then the other into Helena’s shoes.

five, fünf, cinq.

The ride home passes like a dream, like Sarah’s dream; when they get into the backseat Sarah leans over and buries her face in Helena’s shoulder, and that is the greatest difference. Helena’s first thought is: not in public, never in public. She doesn’t have a second thought with words. Instead she just sits there as still as she knows how to and quietly texts away, calling off the hounds while Sarah breathes. Helena can’t stop herself from flexing her feet, feeling the way everything’s changed when she takes off her shoes. The whole world is sharper, closer, easier to touch.

When they make it up the elevator and into the apartment Helena starts heading for the bedroom automatically – instinct – but Sarah kicks off Helena’s shoes again and moves dreamily towards the balcony outside the living room. Helena follows her. Watches flakes of dried blood settle into the carpet.

Outside Sarah leans against the railing, rests her weight on her forearms. In front of her the sky is the color of a bruise, stuffed tight with clouds. There’s a storm coming; Helena can smell it in the air. _Get back inside_ , she wants to say. She doesn’t. She wishes the sky wasn’t this horrible, muddled grey.

“You didn’t kill Alison,” Sarah says. “Did you.” She doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t even look, and Helena feels anger settle over her like an unnatural skin. She isn’t angry at Sarah, that isn’t how this _works_ , it has never been what Helena wanted, she wouldn’t—

“Of course I didn’t,” Helena spits, still hovering in the doorway. “I would never lie to you.”

Each word falls out of her mouth like another sharp stone, too much emphasis and too much anger. I would _never_ lie to you. _I_ would never _lie_ to _you_.

Sarah turns around, at that; her eyelashes flutter like a glitch. Abruptly her shoulders relax. She settles onto the flats of her feet. “You know,” she says.

“Yes, I know,” Helena says. “I know that you’ve spent years acting like the others have any claim at your family, I know _all of it_.”

Sarah blinks, rapidly. She stays silent.

“I thought everything was alright,” Helena says, her voice dangerous and soft. “You let me believe that everything was alright.”

Sarah runs an agitated hand through her hair, combing it out of her face over and over. It’s ridiculous. Helena knows it’ll just fall back in her face, because that’s what Sarah’s hair has been doing since they were eleven years old. She lets Sarah keep doing it anyways. Right hand, at least. That has to mean something.

“I needed us to be alright,” Sarah pleads. “If I didn’t – _say_ anything, it meant everything was perfectly fine. Nothing had _changed_ , as long as I didn’t _say_ …”

“You shouldn’t have _lied to me_ ,” Helena says. “You should have _told me!_ ” Her voice is escalating, they’re yelling, everyone will be able to hear them, but Helena has passed the point of caring. What does it matter? What does any of it matter, because they haven’t been a united front for years.

“We could have fixed it!” she screams. “ _Together_ , Sarah.”

“I promised to look after you!” Sarah screams back.

Helena recoils, back a step, her feet naked and vulnerable on the carpet. The sound rings in the air. I _promised_. Helena can feel her hands shaking, like the low rumble of distant thunder.

“Really,” she says, quiet again. “ _You_ have been looking after _me_.” Sarah opens her mouth, but Helena keeps going, stepping outside. “You’re the one who saw a problem, and you’re the one who fixed it. You’re the one who put your entire life on the line to keep me safe. Is that what you’re telling me?”

Sarah’s face goes white; her voice, when she starts talking again, is void of inflection. “Do not tell me,” she says, “that you did what you did for _me_.”

Helena laughs, an ugly chainsaw rip from the back of her throat. “ _Please_ ,” she says. “I’m not like you. I don’t have anyone else to do it for.”

“You killed her!” Sarah screams, and Helena slams her fist against the floor-to-ceiling window behind her. Glass fractures. Her fist starts dripping blood, slowly on the tile.

“You were falling apart!” she roars back. “I did what I thought was _necessary_.”

“So did I,” Sarah says. Her voice is almost too quiet to hear. She laughs, once, soundlessly. “It seems we don’t know anything about what we need, after all.”

Helena uncurls her fist, slowly. She walks over to Sarah at the edge of the terrace. The city’s sprawled beneath them like something they could grasp. Sarah tilts her head to meet Helena’s gaze; every muscle of her body says _I am so very tired_ , and Helena did this. Helena and Sarah did this to each other, and to themselves.

Helena breaks eye contact, because. Because she’s getting an idea of what they have to do, but she can’t say it out loud.

“We can’t keep going like this, can we,” Sarah says, and Helena’s backwards heart aches. Because Sarah knows what Helena is thinking; Sarah has always known, Sarah has always been able to say what’s on Helena’s mind. Helena shrugs one shoulder instead of answering. She doesn’t want to say it. They’d promised, to never be separate.

“We’ve broken every promise already,” Sarah says. “What an awful job we’ve done of keeping each other safe.”

Helena laughs, a soft high hysterical sound. “We cut each other open,” she says, and then they’re both laughing, the wrung-out sounds of people at the end of the line. Helena closes the distance between them, leans her shoulder against Sarah’s. Her hand drips blood off the balcony, to the ground far far below. Drip, drip, drip.

“Do you remember,” Helena says, “the first time I left for Europe, when we were sixteen.”

Sarah bows her head down, so her hair falls over her face. It’s the first memory of theirs to ever be tainted like this. They are both, Helena is certain, thinking of Sarah in Cosima’s bed. Sarah’s one great secret.

“Yes,” Sarah says. “I remember.”

“Marion took me to lunch when I got back. Offered me a position in the European branch, full-time.”

“That was over ten years ago,” Sarah murmurs. Something is wavering under her voice, something terrible and deep and sad. “Surely the offer doesn’t still stand.”

“That wasn’t,” Helena says, “the only time she made it.”

Sarah abruptly sinks down to the ground, sits with her legs folded to her chest; she’s facing inside, like a mirror to Helena so many hours ago. Waiting for Sarah to come home.

Helena stays standing. Sarah rests her head against the balcony’s edge, the clear glass panel between them and the world outside. Helena can see Sarah’s reflection, warped and blurry, in the glass. She feels like crying. Instead she just keeps looking, unblinking, each familiar line in Sarah’s face. Her nose, the trembling of her eyelashes, Helena _knows_ it. She doesn’t want to look away.

“Tell me we can’t fix it,” Helena says weakly. “I need you to say that we can’t make this better on our own.”

“Cosima dead,” Sarah says dully. “Pills in her throat. All the windows of our apartment shattered. A bullet in your chest, red on all the walls, your hands around my throat.” Drip, drip, drip, Helena’s blood off the edge of the balcony. “Helena. We can’t make this better on our own.”

“ _Ich will sterben_ ,” Helena says softly, and Sarah laughs and says “No you don’t.” She rests her forehead on her knees. Helena’s hand clenches on the railing, with how difficult it is to not sit down next to her. It’s true. She doesn’t want to die, but isn’t this just another sort of dying? And she’d rather die _with_.

Thunder rumbles, loud like a lion’s roar. Just another sort of animal. The sky cracks open and it begins to rain.

“Sarah,” Helena says, “we should go inside,” but Sarah shakes her head _no_.

“Go,” she says. “Pack.” Her voice cracks, shatters. “I can’t—”

“You won’t,” Helena says.

“No,” Sarah whispers, “I won’t.”

Helena opens her mouth, says – each syllable painful, forced from between her teeth – “I want you to.” She shouldn’t have to. Sarah should know what she wants, Sarah should _know_.

“If I did,” Sarah says into the skin of her knees, “you wouldn’t leave.” The rain’s soaking her, soaking both of them. Water trickles onto Sarah’s skin; her blood starts diffusing around her, a great red puddle from the soles of her feet. Helena looks inside. It’s warm, there, and clean. All you have to do is ignore the crack in the glass.

“I’ll do it, then,” Helena whispers, and lets go of the railing. She leaves blood smeared on the railing, but the rain’s already starting to wash it away.

“Goodbye, Sarah,” Helena says, and watches the rain wash the blood away until all of the red is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> The reception's gotten fuzzy  
> The delicate balance has shifted  
> Put on your gloves and your black pumps  
> Let's pretend the fog has lifted
> 
> Now you see me  
> Now you don't  
> Now you say you love me  
> Pretty soon you won't  
> \--"Dilaudid," The Mountain Goats
> 
> Thanks for reading! Thanks for...sticking with the series this long, goodness, you're very strong. Please leave kudos + comments if you enjoyed! :)


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